Home Donate New Search Gallery How-To Books Links Workshops About Contact
Nikon
D5000 User's Guide: June 2009 Top of D5000 Users Guide D5000 Review More Nikon Reviews
NEW: Nikon D5000 Users Guide for iPhone and iPod 23 December 2009
Want free live phone support? In the USA, call (800) NIKON-UX, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
How to Get Here Select the Retouch Menu by pressing MENU, moving to the left and then up or down to select the brush icon second from the bottom. You'll then see RETOUCH MENU on the top of the color LCD. You also can hit OK while an image is playing.
What it Sets This is a silly menu that lets you twiddle with images you've already shot. The originals are unaltered. The D5000 creates new versions of the images and saves them.
The D5000 is sneaky enough to know if a file was created with these trick modes, and often won't let you apply the same filter twice. You can concatenate different filters. If your original image is an NEF or TIFF, it will be saved as a FINE LARGE JPG. Otherwise, it's saved the same way as the original image.
Firmware Defect The new images are saved with a file number one more than the most recent image. The EXIF create time is unaltered, so you'll have to sort images by "create time" if you can. This defect means that the file numbers of the newly created versions are scrambled from the originals. If you're playing with the most recent image, the file numbers are close, but if you're playing with an earlier file, its file number will be unrelated to the original. For instance, if you make an edited version of DCS_0123.jpg, the new file might be called CSC_5837.jpg, with no relation either by letters or by numbers. Good luck! The correct way to do this is to retain the same file name and append -edit, -edit1, -edit2, etc. If Nikon did the correctly, an edited version would be named something like DSC_0123-edit.jpg. Here's what each does.
D-Lighting top This lightens dark shadows. It doesn't touch highlights. You have three levels of lightening: Low, Normal, and High. If you set ADR to AUTO for shooting as I do, you shouldn't need this. Remember: shadows are supposed to be dark.
Red-Eye Correction top This attempts to rectify flash-induced red eyes. This filter is sneaky enough to know if you used flash or not to make the image, and won't let you use this filter if you didn't use flash. I've never had a problem with red-eye with my D5000, so all the better. When I was able to cause red-eye, this filter only corrected half of the eyes!
Trim top This creates cropped versions of images. No pixels are moved or changed in size. Trim removes unwanted pixels from the sides of an image and saves a smaller image.
Monochrome top This creates black-and-white images. It has three modes:
Black-and-White
Sepia (Brown-and-white)
Cyanotype (Blue-and-White)
Have fun!
Filter Effects top This creates images that attempt to simulate what might have happened if you had used a real filter in the first place. You've got your choice of:
Skylight Very slightly pinker.
Warm Filter Slightly warmer (more orange). The Warm filter usually improves casual images. You can forget the skylight filter.
Red, Green or Blue intensifier Self explanatory.
Cross screen This draws little sunstars. It really works, but sadly only offers 4, 6 or 8-pointed stars, not Nikon's usually 14-pointed ones you get from their 7-bladed diaphragms.
Soft Self explanatory.
Color Balance top This one's slick. It calls up a better control panel than Photoshop's color balance tool, which dates from the 1980s. Nikon's tool reminds me of what we have on million-dollar Hollywood telecine color correction machines used to color correct motion pictures. The Nikon D5000 shows three histograms (reminiscent of Tektronix' WFM700 waveform monitors) and the D5000's Up/Down/Left/Right key becomes the color correction track ball. Click it left and right to alter blue-red, and up down for magenta - green. If you have something neutral, watch the waveforms, oops, histograms, until they are about equal. Left - right on the Up/Down/Left/Right key slides the red and blue in opposite directions, and green - magenta slides the red and blue equally left or right. The green stays put. This allows you to correct in any color, and if you want to warm an image (that I do most often in Photoshop), allows more flexibility than the fixed Warm filter above.
Small Picture top This one lets you make a smaller image, for email or web posting, for instance.
Image Overlay top This one's silly, but you can drop two images on top of each other to create a final composite. It only works with source images in NEF.
NEF (RAW) Processing top This lets you make and save a JPG from any raw file. It's helpful if you only shot in raw.
Quick Retouch top This lets you create and save a copy with wilder colors. YES!
Straighten top This lets you fix crooked horizons, up to ±5º.
Distortion Control top This allows creating a new copy of an image with very rudimentary first-order distortion correction. This mode cannot correct the more complex distortion of may wider lenses. It doesn't work very precisely, and you only can see what you're doing by looking at an unzoomed image on the 2.7 " screen. I do these corrections in Photoshop's Lens Distortion Filter, or in DxO, but either of those software packages can cost almost as much as a D5000. Your best bet is to set Auto distortion control ON as you shoot, not fiddle with it in-camera afterwards.
Fisheye top All this does is bloat the center of a rectangular image. It doesn't wrap it into a circle, and it certainly doesn't expand your angle of view. Photoshop's Spherize command is much better, but Photoshop costs almost as much as a D5000.
Color Outline top This is a silly high-pass filter that tries to turn an image into a line drawing. Good luck!
Perspective Control top This helps straighten images that were shot looking up or down, or were out of alignment left or right. I prefer Photoshop's Lens Distortion Filter, but this one's free!
Stop-motion movie top This takes the still frames you select and turns them into an AVI time-lapse movie clip. Used with the intervalometer, you can make some very slick movies this way.
My D5000 User's Guide continues below. I support my growing family through this website. This guide is free to read online, but copyrighted and registered. If you haven't helped yet and would like to save or make a printed copy of this article for your camera bag, please send me $5.00 for each complete or partial copy that you print or save, for personal use only. Others charge $29.99 for crappier information, and with your honesty I can continue to offer these guides online for less. If you bought your D5000 by clicking through my links, then you've saved money and also helped me write this guide. Thank you and please enjoy it. It's great people like you, and those who help me otherwise, who allow me to keep adding to this site for everyone's benefit. The biggest help is to use these links to Adorama, Amazon, B&H, Ritz and J&R when you get your goodies. It costs you nothing and is a huge help to me. These places have the best prices and service, which is why I've used them since before this website existed. I recommend them all personally. Thanks for reading!
Ken Back to Top of D5000 User's Guide or Top of Nikon D5000 Review KNOBS and BUTTONS MENUS RECENT ITEMS (or MY MENU) MENU < < NEXT Home Donate New Search Gallery How-To Books Links Workshops About Contact |